


Don't you see that I'll love you to death?

by Baryshnikov



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Character Death, Dark, Dark Harry Potter, Deluded Thinking, Flowers, Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, Insane Harry Potter, Language of Flowers, M/M, Morbid Romance, Murder, Not Epilogue Compliant, Obsession, Regret, Strangulation, Stream of Consciousness, Tom is non-sentient, Unhealthy Relationships, Unreliable perspective, burial, decomposition, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-18
Updated: 2019-04-18
Packaged: 2020-01-15 14:26:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18500851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Baryshnikov/pseuds/Baryshnikov
Summary: Harry didn't think he'd meant to kill Draco, but he had anyway.





	Don't you see that I'll love you to death?

**Author's Note:**

> This was supposed to be short and sweet, but somewhere along the way, it kinda developed a plot.

They were lying in bed when it happened. Harry could still feel Draco’s hands in his hair, patrician fingers wound around the strands, pulling him up towards his mouth again. When their eyes had met Draco had murmured something to him. Something Harry didn't really pay attention to because he was busy was mouthing just below Dracos' ear, tasting the hidden skin of his neck. Draco had quietly said something about how he wasn’t sure of his place in this world anymore, wasn’t sure whether _this_ was really that he wanted: clandestine meetings and half-kisses, always glancing over his shoulder, always wondering if anyone important had seen, if they would tell people, if he would be ruined. He murmured how he was sorry, _so sorry_ , that he hadn’t said anything earlier, _so very sorry_ that this was how it was what they had become, and maybe he _was_ sorry. But then again, maybe he wasn’t. Harry hadn’t cared at that moment; he hadn’t thought about what Draco meant. He’d just continued kissing down his neck, feeling how Draco shifted, a hand still in his hair, still holding him ever so close. Holding him like he was the last solid mass left in the entire universe, and it had been so intimate and so perfect and not at all like it was coming to an end. 

Harry had sat between Draco’s hipbones, thighs either side of his waist, smiling at him. Harry could remember how his own mouth had moved but not the words that came from his lips, what reassurances he managed, fictitious comforts that were as hollow as Draco’s eyes. _They were fine_. That’s what he said as he traced Draco’s collarbones with his fingers, for he had always loved how delicate Draco’s bones were, how fine and fragile they looked, so easy to snap. Harry wouldn’t admit that he’d thought about how it would feel to break them, back when they were both younger, and those violent passions had been nearer the surface. Back when he didn’t know how to articulate the feelings that had been churning up his stomach. Back to a time before he dipped his fingers into the hollows of Draco’s collarbones and kissed his mouth and ran his fingertips along every bony ridge. Draco had just watched him, and Harry had watched him back. Just watched and reminded himself of how much he loved to just simply look at Draco when they were alone together, and he was stripped back to his bare bones. When all the pretentiousness and primness and poshness were peeled back and it was just Harry’s love that held him together. 

Harry couldn’t remember why he’d put his hands around Draco’s throat, maybe Draco had told him to, maybe he had just wanted to. Either way, his imperfect hands had been pressing against Draco’s pristine pure-blood neck. Draco had looked up at him with his empty eyes, and those eyes had just begged him to do it. To press harder than he should, to see Draco at first bite his lip and close his eyes, and then splutter, and then start to push back against him. To keep his hands squeezing and squeezing and squeezing as though they were snakes, long green grass snakes that always knew what they wanted, and always knew how to get it. Long green snakes that didn’t have to worry about consequences, didn’t have to hear the little choking sounds that came from somewhere in Draco’s throat. Even now they echoed around Harry’s head, and all the time he could see Draco’s eyes before his own. How he stared straight at him, even when he was struggling, even as he was scratching red lines into Harry’s wrists, little red marks that now stung his knuckles. How Draco had just looked so desperate, so hopeful, so grateful that Harry was finally fulfilling his greatest wish, and Harry could have got drunk off that gaze. The immense appreciation that seeped from it. The thanks that spilled from his eyes as Harry’s fingers buried themselves in his neck forever more. 

Harry hadn’t let go for a long time. Even after Draco had stopped struggling, even after Draco had stopped moving, even after Draco had stopped breathing. Even though in the back of his head he knew Draco was dead, Harry hadn’t removed his hands, because if he did that, then it was real, then he had really killed him, and he was simply a monster. Harry wasn’t ready to admit what he was, though perhaps he’d always known. Perhaps in the bottom of his heart, Harry knew he would eventually do something like this, that it was an inevitable outcome of having someone infecting your soul. People told him that whatever had been there was not there anymore, that Tom had been forced out. But the truth was, and Harry knew despite them never telling him, they could never be sure. No one had done anything like that before, no one knew what damage it might cause having someone infecting your soul with their poison, seeping so deep into you that you could no longer tell him from you. No one knew how far Tom had burrowed apart from Harry himself, and Harry did not like what he thought he knew. Just sitting there with his hands still on Draco’s throat he thought he could hear a hiss in the air and a coldness on his shoulders, as though someone’s hands were holding him steady. On Draco’s dead lips he caught the hint of a smile that wasn’t Draco’s and he knew. All this was inevitable. 

Harry didn’t move, other than to let go of Draco’s neck and move to sit beside him rather than on top of him. But he couldn’t help but continue to look at Draco’s body, see how it was as perfect in its death as it had been in its life. Just lying them there with its mouth open a little, eyes staring at nothing across the room. Harry felt his eyes wandering to his neck, to the fingerprints that would forever stain the perfect skin, and the red spreading like a blossom across the white, white skin. Despite the evidence of the corpse that lay before him, Harry couldn’t quite believe that Draco was dead, he looked too pristine to have died, too gorgeous to have no beating heart inside his chest. Even less could Harry believe that he was responsible. How could mere hands have caused so much damage? How could _his_ hands have done something like that? Not when his hands had saved people, given so many a life they thought they would be denied. How could _they_ have taken someone’s life so easily? Just ripped it from them as though it was nothing. How could such a hateful act leave such pretty marks behind, and why were his hands not stained red with guilty blood?

It wasn’t his fault though, how could it have been when Draco had said he wanted to die? He had said that all his problems would disappear if he just died. That was what he said. At least that’s what Harry _thought_ he said. So, could he really blame himself if he had merely fulfilled what Draco had asked for? No, he couldn’t. Draco shouldn’t have asked for things he didn’t want, he should have known that Harry would try and make him happy, that he would do anything that Draco asked because he loved Draco in his own strange way. That didn’t stop him from blaming himself though. After all, if he hadn’t done that, then Draco wouldn’t be lying beside him with his fingerprints embedded in his neck. Harry couldn’t help but glance at his glassy eyes and wonder whether he truly meant to die, whether that was what he wanted in the depth of his heart, or whether he had forced his own desires upon him. Whether that nasty thing that lurked under his skin had forced its desires upon both of them. 

Harry knew he couldn’t deny that it had been bubbling just below the surface for so long, the desire to do something like this, something cruel and painful. Though he couldn’t say why he had wanted to do it, just that he had. It was a feeling he was barely conscious of, but he could always feel, especially when he was with Draco. There was just something about Draco that brought it all to the surface; perhaps it was his innocence, that incorruptible youth-like manner that Draco conducted himself with. Or maybe it was that smile that looked pristine but was cracked and spilling over with sadness. Even when Draco hadn’t been trying, he’d forced something up from the depths of Harry’s soul. Something that Harry had always ignored, maybe even had assumed was love itself. Now he understood it wasn’t. Now, after all was done, he understood that perhaps the gnawing in his stomach had been something much more sinister than love. 

That thing that scratched and chewed the lining of his stomach and begged him silently to set it free, was a tendril of whatever monster lurked in the darkest, most hidden part of his soul. It had been with him all his life, growing stronger without him knowing, begging and begging and begging for him to let it out into the world. Well, now he finally had, and it had destroyed the thing he’d loved the most. He should hate himself. He should have been disgusted. But he wasn’t. Harry couldn’t feel anything at all, it was as though everything inside him had been sucked out and all was left was a cavity and a suspended heart. He still couldn’t believe that he’d done it at all, that alone he had extinguished so many years of life. He should have felt awful, but that whisper on the air was telling him otherwise. It murmured words of respect, of how much love Harry must have felt to kill the thing he cherished. It murmured how Draco had wanted it, how he had called it all off, said he was so tired and how it just wanted it all to end. 

Ever so gently Harry ran his fingers over Draco’s skin. He was going cold, and he wondered how long he had been sitting and staring. Not doing anything, though something would have to be done soon. Harry knew he had to decide whether he was going to admit this or not, whether he was going to look Draco’s parents in the eye, and tell them the reason that their son was dead. He knew already that he couldn’t do that, that he wouldn’t do it because then they would take Draco away. They would remove the one thing that he had so loved, and they would put him into a cold dark vault where he would lie forever. Draco didn’t like the dark, nor the cold, nor the damp. He would have wanted to stay by Harry’s side. That’s what he would have wanted, Harry should know, he knew him best. 

Harry told no one and one asked because no one really knew about them. They hadn’t told people because others would never understand how two people, who were so fundamentally different, could have ever come to love each other. Harry doubted his friends would have been able to see past the childhood jibes, and Draco had doubted whether his parents would accept someone like Harry into the fold. So, it had stayed their special secret. Just the two of them forever, no one to interrupt, no one to spoil what they had. No one igniting jealousy or arguments or measly squabbles. With no one knowing they were free to spend their Saturday nights lying on the sofa talking about everything, and their Sunday mornings doing nothing. Harry loved when Draco just let him touch his face. Just let him reach out and run his fingertips over his cheekbones, and stroke his soft skin and realise that it was all real. 

So real. So painfully real that it was now all gone. He couldn’t tell anyone. Even when people started to ask questions; when they started to wonder where Draco was. Not that anyone asked him, they all thought that he would neither know nor care. Harry wished he could tell them. He wished that they would give him time to explain it all, to make them understand that despite what had happened, despite what he’d done, he wasn’t bad. Draco had wanted it. But they wouldn’t believe him, of course, they wouldn’t. They’d all accuse him of lying. His friends would say he was protecting someone else because he did things like that. Draco’s friends would say he knowingly murdered Draco because Draco represented everything he professed to hate. Everything that he had spent his life fight against had been contained within Draco’s perfect soul, and so all they would see was hate. But Harry knew it wasn’t hatred that drove him to such actions, it would never have been hate that made him do those things because he didn’t hate Draco. He loved him. He loved him more than anything and anyone in the entire world, and maybe that was why he’d done it because he loved him too much. 

That was why he kept his mouth shut and said nothing even when Draco’s corpse still lay on his bed. He didn’t know what to do with it and preservation charms would only last so long. He could only keep pretending that everything was fine for a finite amount of time, then he’d have to step out into the light and face what he’d done. Or maybe he didn’t have to. Maybe he could hide Draco away and pretend that it never happened at all. After all, if there was no body, how did anyone truly know that Draco had really died? Everyone who knew him, knew Draco loved the sea, that was where they would look. Scouring stretches and stretches of endless coastline, looking between the sand and the sea and the shells just for the chip of a tooth. Just one single indication that that was where Draco had gone. That that was where he had died, doing something he loved, instead of it being done by a nameless figure in a nameless alleyway after dark. 

Harry had seen many corpses in his life, too many if he was honest. They seemed to be a permanent fixture always on the edge of his world, everywhere he looked were the smiles of people who were no longer alive. Sometimes he felt their fingers on his shoulder and heard their words in his ear. He heard Tom’s words the most, just whispers on the wind from a voice he recollected from so many years ago. Back before the world seemed so dark and clouds obscured his vision of what could be. He supposed if he told people of what he saw and what he heard then they would either call him silly or they’d say it was just ghosts. It wasn’t ghosts. Ghosts had a physical presence; these were just second-long imprints burned into the frays of his vision. Harry wished they were ghosts. He would rather see ghosts that hollowed eyes and empty chests, white faces staring at him than contorting ones crying out. He’d rather see Draco’s lovely ghost by his side than Draco’s empty-eyed corpse. 

It was at times like this when Harry was grateful that he was granted privacy for his sacrifice. Growing up in the steady glow of a spotlight had awarded him luxuries when he wanted to return to the gloom of an ordinary humdrum life. His efforts had won him the right to live alone, to hide in the shadows and excuse himself early. It allowed him to be reclusive and solitary and all the other things he wanted to be. It also allowed him to drag the body of his lover out under the stars and guarantee that no one would see. Draco’s corpse was heavier than he thought it would be, and it left a long trail behind it of flattened grass and crushed flowers. Somehow it looked so obvious what he had done but only because he knew. It was then, half-way down the garden, that Harry decided that levitating would be better, after all, there was no one here to see. Draco’s floating corpse, wrapped up in their sheets, was almost ethereal as it swam through the air. Delicate and fragile and lovely, glowing so bright in the gloom, a cold radiance shining white and intense like daisies under the moonlight. 

Harry was planning on burying him, he really was. Planning on digging deep into the earth and delivering him from all the monsters in the world. Returning him to a place where Draco would be loved, a place where he would be useful, as he always wanted to be. Under the soil, he would have fed the worms and given new life to the flowers whose roots would have spread through his veins. But Harry couldn’t bear to do that. He couldn’t have Draco shut away out of sight forever and ever, never again to be seen or touched, never again to be loved. He couldn’t do that. Not to the man he had loved the most, more than anything else in the entire world. So, he left him on the ground beneath the Japanese Maple Tree, where no one would ever see unless they looked. Where he was protected from the rain and the chill and the animals that walked through the world. A place where Harry could come and sit and watch him lying there as though he were asleep, even though he knew now that he wasn’t. 

It seemed like the perfect plan, after all, even if someone did find Draco’s breaking body, they would not assume the chosen one had done it. No, it was someone with a grudge, a fanatic that wanted to frame him. That is what they would say. That is what everyone would say. No one would suspect that his hands could do such things. No one would ever believe that _he_ could ever do something like that. If the evidence was not so clearly before him, if Draco’s body was not slowly collapsing in on itself before his very eyes, Harry too would doubt that he could do something so monstrous. But Draco _was_ before him, and he knew what he had done. As he sat watching a ladybird crawl over Draco’s thigh, he heard those voices sliding through the leaves again. That admiration and respect and approbation of what Harry had done. He knew whose voice was murmuring those things, but he also knew that it was all impossible because Tom had died such a long time ago now. But then again impossible things happened all the time.

Harry did not like what came next. The nervous waiting, the fear that filled his lungs, the ever-present feeling that someone knew. And the grief. Harry had not thought that he would have to grieve a death he himself had caused. He had imagined that, somehow, because he was the one to do this, that it wouldn’t matter to him, that he would be able to just walk away from it all and not cry himself to sleep every night, wishing that he still had Draco by his side. But that’s what he did. Every night there were little things that Draco did, little thing that reminded Harry of what he had done. Sometimes they were simple, like the time he’d left the duvet crumpled in the morning and when he’d returned, he almost heard Draco’s voice telling him to make the bed. Other times it was something deeper, something that permeated right to his core, like when Draco’s owl came here on Sundays just looking for its owner. It perched on the window refusing to leave until Harry forcefully intervened with a broom. 

Some days all the memories were just so bad that Harry couldn’t bear to even visit Draco. He couldn’t bear to watch the skin of his lover darken with unnatural hues, white skin turning to gold and orange as though he was rusting away, turning to a sunset on the ground and spilling all across the soil. Rotting bodies were not as pretty as Harry thought they’d be. Really, they were just sad, just nutrients and chemicals, muscle and fat, that’s all people were, that’s all they would ever be. So, Harry did not go outside, instead, he stayed inside, pretending that everything was fine, everything was normal. He tried, tried so hard to get rid of every inch of Draco from the house. He burned his clothes and listened to them crackle, buried his cologne in the garden. He wanted to destroy his wand as well, snap it and throw it away, but no matter how hard he tried, Harry couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead, he sat every night and watched it. It, sitting on the table, and he, on the floor, just watching each other, as if the wand itself knew what he had done. 

But no matter what he did, however much he tried to get Draco out of his life, tried to scrub every inch of him from the house, Draco was always there. He was the brightness at the window at dawn, watching the sun rise over the hills. He was the sound of footsteps in the hall late at night, tapping away as he walked back and forth and back again. He was the warmth that Harry thought he felt touch his hand in the afternoon when he was reading in Draco’s favourite chair. Draco was everywhere. He was even sewn into the very air, the pervading smell of rot and flowers. Flowers. Harry swallowed and thought as he lay in bed staring at the ceiling. Draco had always loved flowers, especially the ones that featured in the romance novels he pretended he didn’t like to read. Draco was always so particular when he brought Harry flowers, they were always handcrafted and painfully meaningful, Harry knew that even if he didn’t understand the meanings. It had been a long time since Draco last brought him flowers, the last bouquet was still on the windowsill, dried and crumpled now, but Harry could still remember exactly what it was. A bunch of daffodils, all different shades, all so pretty. _For new beginnings_. That was what Draco had said, _for new beginnings_.

Draco liked flowers, so Harry would give him flowers. No one had come asking questions yet so what did it matter if he moved Draco, moved him out from under the shade and into the world, to feel the chill of Spring on his bones and be picked apart by the birds, returned to the earth in nature’s cycle. As he dragged what was left, Harry noticed the glitter of silver on Draco’s finger, a ring of his family. Draco had always worn that ring for as long as Harry had known him. He said it was a connection to the past, a reminder of what he was and who he could be. Harry looked around the garden as though there was someone to judge him for what he was about to do. He saw no one, so he did it. He slid the ring off Draco’s finger bone and into the palm of his hand. It was still cold from the shade against his skin and Harry couldn’t help but keep holding it, as though it were his last connection with Draco, and maybe it was? For soon Draco would be nothing more than flowers and bones, and Harry would have nothing material left of him 

Harry found a book, the useful one, on the self in the library. He remembered Draco using it when he was designing bouquets for his parents. Flicking through its pages, there were so many flowers and herbs and grasses, everything possible to send exactly the right message, the introduction said. Harry wondered what message he wanted to send, what he was really trying to say with his flowers. He wanted to remind Draco just how much he loved him, even when he was dead and couldn’t say it back. He wanted to say just how much he missed him and how much he needed him back by his side, and how glad he was that Draco would never leave him now. How glad he was that they would always have each other. He had so much to say. But he continued to flick through the pages making lists and remaking lists, finding out what would actually grow and what would die, which colours would go together, and which should be kept apart. All because Draco had to be beautiful, even when he was rotting. 

It was strange to touch his lover again, to touch him and feel parts of him that Harry had never thought about before. To feel his ribs and collarbone, to see revealed all the secret parts that Draco would never show anyone else. It was intimate, special, and brought them closer than they could have ever been before. Perhaps it was good that he had died? Harry did not dwell on the thought; he did not like to. Instead, he went and brought flowers, went and talked in gentle voices to florists about colours and scents and other things that he might need to know. They were all so polite and sweet, and they loved how much devotion he showed towards his lover. Every single one of them said so, said they wished they had someone who cared so much about them. Harry only smiled and said that his lover would do the same for him. He knew he would because he and Draco had a connection, and he was going to find it again. Harry was going to do everything in his power to reconnect them, to link them together even when one of them was so detached from the world. 

Out in the garden, Harry started with Draco’s stomach as it lay open and exposed to the clouds and the shade and all the elements of the world. In it, Harry buried purple hyacinths and red roses, the purple and the red mingling together, like the insides of people before they rot. Filling Draco’s stomach with love and requests for forgiveness would bring them closer because as much as Harry wanted those things, he imagined Draco wanted them just as much. He imagined that Draco would love to apologise for dying, he would, if he could, sit up and smile and say _please forgive me Harry_. He would apologise and profess his love and they could be happy again. Harry moved upward, running his fingers over the sticky remnants of flesh and innards and maggots, towards Draco’s collapsing ribcage. Through it, Harry could see right down to the soil beneath, and it was into the rich earth that he planted honeysuckle in place of his lungs. That would show Draco how Harry couldn’t breathe when he was nearby, how speechless he made him, and what a strong bond they had because that was what honeysuckles meant, a strong bond between two lovers. 

Next, it was the forget-me-nots. Harry wound them around Draco’s ribs, entwining them with the white bones, picked clean by the birds. Such tiny flowers highlighted the fragility of Draco’s body, the finite existence that he had, but Harry knew with these flowers swirled across his ribs, Draco would never ever forget him. That somehow these little flowers would tie them together forever more. Stepping back to stare, Harry could see that there were still some gaps, some holes in this artwork that had not yet been filled. Harry filled them in with heliotrope, bright, vivid, purple heliotrope that spoke of an eternal love because every part of Harry body was just as infected with this devotion, with this love that was almost a sickness. When he looked back at Draco’s bones, they had never looked so gorgeous, coloured with so many hues and so much love, so much understanding. He hoped that wherever Draco was, he could see just how beautiful he looked. 

But Harry still had flowers, he still had meanings to covey, lavender and pink carnations had to be planted. The lavender was easy. Harry planted it like a halo of devotion crowning Draco’s hair. Purple and scented and striking, it took away all the nastiness of death and left nothing but beauty behind. The last flower was pink carnations, Draco had always loved them. He said they grew along the fence in his parent’s garden, a trail of pink petals was left behind in the spring. When they had first met, and first begun this love affair, Draco had spoken of taking him there one day, of showing him how he had spent lonely childhoods wandering along that petal path, hoping to find something or someone to be friends with. Harry loved that memory. He loved how Draco’s eyes had changed whenever he spoke of it, how he reminisced so peacefully but his words were coloured with so many tints of sadness. A sad sort of pink that reminded Harry of candyfloss left on the grass after a funfair. But Draco was not alone now. Now he had Harry, and he would _always_ have Harry because just as the carnations promised, Harry would never forget him. 

As he lay beside his flower bed, Harry knew somewhere inside him that there had to be something wrong with him, normal people wanted marriage and romance. They wanted to sit and hold hands with their lover, lying under the sun with a picnic, their children running through the cornflowers. They did not want to lie on their backs under storm clouds, the air chilling their fingertips, wind cracking their lips; their lover’s corpse decomposing beside them. But that is exactly what he wanted. That was exactly what he was doing. He didn’t care that he couldn’t feel his fingers or that Draco’s hands were just bones that did not squeeze his own back. All that mattered was he and Draco was together again, together, where no one could drag them apart. All that mattered was they were safe in their futures, that they were happy in the moment and no one could take anything away from them ever again. 

The only one that Harry would let touch Draco again was the birds. The tiny little sparrows with their pointed beaks and the blue tits with their colours that would have complimented Draco’s eyes, even the blackbirds that floated down from the trees and pecked the flesh from bone. Stripped him down to the very barest of human existence. Harry wanted to run his fingers over those bones, feeling how day after day after day they became more and more pronounced. Until one day there was nothing but bone for his fingertips to touch. He knew that he would lie with Draco’s skeleton until the end of time if he could. That he would never move, never eat, never drink. That he would waste away if that meant he could join Draco once again. Harry could almost feel it when he lay so motionless, almost feel the grass growing over his feet and the daisies curling themselves around his fingers. He would just lie there and watch the garden he planted in Draco’s body grow, see the honeysuckles blossom in the remnants of Draco’s lungs, and the lavender weaved its way through Draco’s hair like a flower crown. He would admire the flowers that he did not plant, the buttercups that sprouted through his eye sockets and the dandelions that grew through his fingers. And Harry would always care for Draco’s body, would always tend to the garden that grows in his carcass. 

Draco liked apples so Harry put one under his ribs, between the petals and leaves of the honeysuckle, and beneath the forget-me-nots. He thought that it might grow into an apple tree, and that, in some strange way it would enable Draco to be with him again. If he were an apple tree, then Harry could sit beneath his branches, laugh with him, nurture him. He could have him by his side again, and it would be like the time before Harry had killed him. People would call it endearing if they knew, they would call it sweet and romantic because it was. Harry could almost picture every day in the future, every day in every season. Him just sitting beneath an apple tree, with the blossom falling onto his hair, or the shade sheltering him, or taste of apples on his tongue, or the beauty of it when the snow fell. Forevermore he would be with Draco, and Draco would be with him, and they could have their perfect fairy tale. 

Harry didn’t hear Ginny. She wasn’t expected. She was supposed to be away, doing the thing was best at. But she wasn’t, she was here, standing in the garden looking at the flowers and the grass and the edge of bone lying on the ground. _Harry_. The way she said it was so quiet, so unlike Ginny, like the words themselves were sticking in her throat. He realised then that her eyes were not on the ground, but on his fingers. She was looking at the ring he wore on his ring finger. _I’m engaged_. He wasn’t, and it was a painful lie. And Ginny wasn’t a stupid girl and she looked at him like he was crazy because she knew what it was, whose it had been. _Harry, what have you done?_ He didn’t know how to answer her, how to explain all the things he had done, how he hadn’t meant to do it, how Draco had wanted it, how it was all inevitable because of what he was. Ginny hadn’t stayed to hear his explanations, she had turned her back and started walking away, a hand to her head, trying to work out how they got here. 

Harry didn’t know why he did it. But Ginny made him. If she hadn’t walked away then maybe they could have talked it out, she could have understood that he had to, that he’d had no choice in the matter, and that everything after had just happened. He was only trying to make the best of a bad situation and it wasn’t anyone’s business what he was doing, not anymore. But Ginny didn’t listen, she just walked away, walked until she was running, and he was running after her. She just needed to understand how much he had loved Draco, how there wasn’t a day when he didn’t think about him, about what they could have been. How he lay in the sun staring at the clouds as they had used to all those years ago. How he dreamt of a different world where all the things he loved still walked the earth. How his arms would have been interlinked with Draco’s and they were going to walk into the better world together. But she didn’t listen. He didn’t mean to do it, except he did. 

Ginny’s body was warm on the ground, bathed in the grey of the clouds, her hair covering her face. _It’s so easy, isn’t it?_ Said the voice on the wind whose cold fingers touched his arm. _It’s so easy to become a monster_. Harry didn’t want to listen. He didn’t want to see Tom’s smile in the clouds as they slid above him or hear his voice in the chirping of the birds. He didn’t want to remember that he had a darkness in his heart or monsters in his fingers. Harry just wanted to be left alone to lie until the sun went down and until he could fall asleep and he could forget all the bad things he had done. All the things that had been inevitable from the very beginning because he had the glimmers of a monster in his soul. All the things that other people were too afraid to do, because other people didn’t want to lie in the long grass, fingers digging into the soil, with their lover’s skull to their right, and their childhood friend’s corpse to their left. Other people didn’t want that. Other people were normal. Harry knew he wasn’t though. He knew that now, and soon everyone would because it wouldn’t be long now before people came here, before people found out what he’d done. Maybe he could stop them too, maybe he could lie with the corpses of all his friends and together they could make the world perfect again? Maybe he could do that? _Maybe this was only the beginning_.

**Author's Note:**

> Not sure what this was or where it came from, it just sort of happened as part of an elaborate procrastination plan, but anyway I hope it wasn't too bad.


End file.
